While advertisers can only estimate how many viewers consume a commercial on TV, statistics from sites like YouTube say exactly which World Cup-related commercial attracted the most attention during the tournament’s first week.

It was Activia, by the way. By June 18, the yogurt manufacturer’s collaboration with Shakira had attracted nearly 137 million views on YouTube, providing concrete proof of the ad’s reach and still more evidence that when a campaign’s popularity is measurable, a 30-second TV spot is no longer enough.

As they do, and as consumer data becomes more reliable, experts say buyers and sellers of sponsorships to major sporting events need to adjust.

“Traditional advertising is a dying medium,” says Queens University business professor Tandy Thomas of TV advertising. “Why would someone pay to have their ad shown when it doesn’t get the same attention as it does online. (Sponsorship sellers have to offer) more than just the 30-second spot. There have to be perks — preferential access to other resources. If you want people to pay for it, you have to give them more.”

According to Google, YouTube viewers watched 1.2 billion minutes of World Cup-related ads on their video sharing site. Ad viewing for the Super Bowl, where commercials often attract more attention than the game, topped out at 300 million minutes, Google said in a memo released last week.

Of the Top 10 most-watched ads during the World Cup’s first week, two came from tournament sponsor Adidas, while three more were Nike ads.

And nearly all were too long to fit into a standard television commercial break. Instead, sponsors are teaming with content studios to produce short films centered around their products.

That type of storytelling keeps viewers on the page longer — Beats by Dre’s “The Game Before the Game” ad lasts five minutes — but also brings viewers back. Google reports that brands with the most popular ads have seen an average 18 per cent increase in subscribers to their YouTube channels.

Data like that will shape the way these companies approach sponsoring major sports events in the future.

“The challenge becomes how do you distinguish yourself when so many brands, both sponsors and non-sponsors, are part of the (online) conversation,” says Matt Logue, vice president of strategy and a partner at the S&E Sponsorship Group. “The digital platform allows you to extend the event window. Sponsors get a lot more mileage out of their sponsorship . . . and can use a smart digital buy to intersperse themselves in the conversation.”

Meanwhile, analytics firms are using World Cup-related internet activity to gather consumer data that marketers can use later. A New York-based digital advertising provider called Exponential spent the months leading up to the World Cup tracking social media posts and other online activity and used the information to build profiles for World Cup fans from various countries.

The research led them to conclude that Canadian fans fell largely into two groups — new Canadians who import a love of soccer from their home countries, and well-to-do city dwellers with plenty of disposable income.

Exponential senior director of insights Bryan Melmed says Canada’s online privacy rules prevent the company from tracking users as intensively as they do in the U.S., but says they still glean valuable information from World Cup fans that will benefit their clients long after the tournament ends.

“It’s not easy to pick out trendsetters, but if we see they’re interested in the World Cup we’ve just found a very valuable contact for any trendy brand,” Melmed says. “They’re the type of consumers advertisers salivate over.”

Correction - June 25, 2014:
This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly referred to Exponential as an online advertising consultancy company.

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